Up until now I thought the Masterpieces in Brawl were just Virtual Console channels that had time limits on them.

However, there seems to be additional info there. I tried my Wii on a widescreen TV (the one it's on most of the time is in 4:3 mode), and surely enough, the Masterpieces were pillarboxed to preserve their original aspect ratio, while the VC channels of the same titles (I tried things like Super Mario Bros. and Star Fox) are stretched and you have to adjust the aspect on the TV.

Is the pillarboxing only due to Brawl? Or are they actually different than VC in that they have aspect coding? Is it possible to modify the .wad of VC titles to automatically adjust aspect ratios like Brawl does? It's not that I mind changing it on the TV... but it would be nice if it automatically adjusted.

But are they different than actual Virtual Console titles? They have the exact same Operation Manuals and controls, the only difference (other than saving, and the time limit) is the fact that it's "smart" when it comes to aspect ratios.

The Masterpieces appear to be self-contained applications, similar to the VC titles, but I'm almost sure the emulators are different from the ones used in the VC (after all, it seems there are some additional features, such as automatic SRAM loading and, of course, the time limit)

Strangely, I was not able to find the corresponding files on the SSBB disk. I simply can't find them, even though it shouldn't be to hard, since the file size of at least one of them (Ocarina of Time) must be more than 32 MB. But there's no such file on the disk. If we could find them, we could tell how they work.